TRADE is such a detriment to POE 2 being fun

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Erebus1800#6364 wrote:

You literally never have to trade if you dont want to...
But then again you have been spending the past week on here just trying to stir shit up, so I dont really think you care as much as you are presenting.

This is simply not true. Grow up, people who have differing views than you aren't "stirring shit up" they are passionate about the game. You can disagree with someone without resorting to slander.

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Gimatria#7361 wrote:

Trading is an integral part of PoE

And this is the problem for a great many people.

Nothing beats the thrill of getting a loot drop that you're going to use that you found yourself. These are the power spike moments, these are the moments that we radically change our builds with glee. People resort to trade because they HAVE TO to keep up the pace of other players. It kills the magic, it destroys the randomization that fuels the fun.

It is inherently unfun and steals away from the thrill of the core game that everyone comes for to be able to pick and choose loot with exacting stats.

Once you are able to convert currency into items through trade. All the gameplay disappears, and power growth becomes a stale, planned linear progression built around cookie cutter builds.

It destroys the fun.

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Gimatria#7361 wrote:

In 10 years of playing PoE, I've never been ripped off.

And what are you talking about trade chat? Nobody does that. Trade on the tradewebsite?

Trading is an integral part of PoE, and there's always SSF if you don't like it.

It is rare. Just in settlers I accidentally shorted someone and when I realized I quickly went to their HO and made them whole. Idk if they didn't notice or care, but I've only had good experiences and try to keep it that way.

When the trade is too fast and easy it becomes the main way to upgrade items. No searching, no crafting, no checking vendors. You have a list, you find an upgrades buy them, and repeat the process in a while. This is a detraction from the big part of the game that is about gearing up.

When I saw this done in diablo 3 it was so disheartening.

I like that from the begining I have to care about the gear and simple upgrade to my flash can be a challange that in the end feels rewarding. Instead of just easy one click solution to upgrade everything.

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Bakubylozajete#1182 wrote:

When the trade is too fast and easy it becomes the main way to upgrade items. No searching, no crafting, no checking vendors. You have a list, you find an upgrades buy them, and repeat the process in a while. This is a detraction from the big part of the game that is about gearing up.

When I saw this done in diablo 3 it was so disheartening.

I like that from the begining I have to care about the gear and simple upgrade to my flash can be a challange that in the end feels rewarding. Instead of just easy one click solution to upgrade everything.

Does it really matter if that piece of gear comes from a vendor or from another player?
When vendor gear is tied to level ups, what do you do when you reach 80+? Leveling has slowed down significantly by that point, and when you do you HOPE that the vendor has SOMETHING good for you. Which, 99% of vendor gear WILL need to have additional crafting done to it. So now you have to spend your gold and orbs and hope the mods that get added are useful to you. If not, oh well, sorry you wasted your resources. Get back to mapping with no upgrade...

You're complaining about something entirely optional that you don't have to participate in. You literally don't have to trade with others if you don't want to.

My Trade Doesn't Affect Your Game.

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Pancaketastic#1713 wrote:

My Trade Doesn't Affect Your Game.

That's not true though. Because the game is designed to have items balanced around randomized randomized randomizations.

The fact is those who participate in trade will acquire items faster, they will trade for more currency items that they need.

And this leads to a much more steady and predictable path to power, which I understand the allure of as the game designer, but for a GREAT many players we want to play the game and get loot.

Players trading and interacting in mass amounts of loot manipulation is absolutely going to affect the path to power for players who don't like these extensive gambling and chance mechanics.

You have to admit, that a player that only grabs loot from the ground, and doesn't enjoy the active modifier chance mechanics and doesn't like trade is going to be at a SEVERE disadvantage when it comes to power progression.

You can argue, "Well they should learn it! It's part of the game! Chance and rerolling items and failing and failing and failing is what makes POE POE!"

But that doesn't change the fact that to a huge swathe of the player base, they just don't like these mechanics. They would be happier if they didn't have to deal with them and the game was tuned in other ways to allow for power progression without so much of a slot machine feel. Or having to open external websites for trade.

A lot of us just want to kill monsters and get great loot. We still enjoy itemization, we still enjoy creating builds. But we don't like the linear path to power and the exact builds that results from mass trade with hundreds of thousands of other players. It just kills the whole experience of random loot.

"But the currency items allow for chance!" And lots of people hate it! It's very rarely satisfying, we want the chance roll to be on the monster loot! We don't want 5/6 of our items to turn to shit for trying to make it better.

POE crafting is designed around failure. They could absolutely reduce drop rates and increase the chance of improved items, but they don't. The game is designed for us to fail and fail and fail. It's annoying.

Honestly, maybe I am in the minority but I agree. Trade makes the game way less fun for me and playing SSF just doesn't feel like a great alternative because sometimes I would actually like to trade. It's just unlimited trading that I see as being a problem.

Once you get a taste of power through a trade, it's hard not to keep going. It feels like you're nerfing yourself by crafting your own gear, and if the only "solution" is to be playing a mode which is severely unpopular then I have to say it's a game design flaw at that point.

Some of the most fun I've ever had in an ARPG was in Diablo 3 after they eliminated trade. They just completely removed it, made everything account bound. And surprisingly it was by far the best state the game had ever been in. By forcing everyone to be SSF, you completely removed the feeling of being inferior by not engaging in some boring typing simulator trade website. If you wanted to get stronger, you just had to play the game more and it was incredibly satisfying because it was the only way to get power.

I don't think PoE needs to delete trading, but there has to be a happy middleground somewhere. We don't need a penalty for trading, we need a system that rewards you for not trading.

There are two solutions I can think of:

1 - Boosted stats on gear you've found/crafted yourself that slowly decreases with each level (being 0% boost at level 100). That way, you are encouraged to create and use your own items, and unless you get extremely lucky you're not going to have broken gear that causes you to trivialize the game. And even if you do, it will go away as you level up more, so at the absolute worst you get a power spike for playing the game the intended way, which is a good thing.

2 - Currency tiers, so that you get currency drops that only work on specific level ranges of items depending on how far in the game you are. Perhaps even some untradeable currency items that drop at a lesser rate so that you're forced to craft with them. If currency you find only worked on items near your level, you wouldn't need to try to save them to trade later on (since by then they'd be worth a lot less).

Both of these solutions don't hurt trading, since you can still trade and get OP gear if you want to. You just might have saved time making it yourself.

Currency is definitely the problem though. If you want to play efficiently you are forced to save them up to trade them for gear. It feels really bad exalt slamming a level 30 yellow item to get absolute trash on it when a single exalt can be traded for a ridiculously powerful item.

Literally a straight downgrade for console players, in POE1 we have the trade board where we can buy and sell items from other players without the inconvenience of inviting them to a game, opening a trade window, trying to count their payment as fast as possible while not getting scammed etc.
POE2 really feels like POE1 if it devolved into a NES game where you can die to any enemy.

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MigoLyco#8472 wrote:

Literally a straight downgrade for console players, in POE1 we have the trade board where we can buy and sell items from other players without the inconvenience of inviting them to a game, opening a trade window, trying to count their payment as fast as possible while not getting scammed etc.
POE2 really feels like POE1 if it devolved into a NES game where you can die to any enemy.

Personally I love the difficulty of the game, I just hate that they made a game where trading is even more necessary without giving us the tools to get gear on our own efficiently. You need one or the other.

I find Solo self found could get better drop rates in exchange for not being able to trade. On the other hand drop rate are already quite good.
Alternatively there could be something like "trade allowed, but only with friends and people in current group" as an inbetween of the 2 extremes of trading focused and trading forbidden.